


hidden variables

by nysscientia



Series: probabilities [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Slash, Sarcasm, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-21 00:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3671238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nysscientia/pseuds/nysscientia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha’s got a weapon out and the stairwell covered between the space of one breath and the next.  Hill, meanwhile, is in a ready stance but has a hand out, signaling Tony to stand down.  The order chafes, but he forces his hands to relax.  He’s learning about teamwork.</p>
<p>They wait like that for almost a minute, breathing shallowly and listening.  Whoever’s approaching sounds like they’ve only just figured out what feet are for and don’t quite get how gravity factors in yet, but Tony thinks he counts three or four through the blundering.</p>
<p>When the stairwell door finally opens, Tony’s not expecting any of the people who fall into the room.  He immediately chastises himself, because of course it’s these three.</p>
<p>Tony recognizes Sam Wilson from Hill’s files, although in pictures the man always looks cool and collected, not covered in blood and deeply irritated about it.  He’s followed closely by a limping, furious-looking Bucky Barnes, who Tony honestly expected never to see again.</p>
<p>And between the two of them, they’re dragging nearly three hundred pounds of unconscious American hero.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hidden variables

**Author's Note:**

> This is a continuation of [fluke](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2011758), but it probably reads just fine as a standalone. Background pairings are heavily implied Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson and briefly implied Maria Hill/Pepper Potts, for those who are interested. I do intend to continue playing with this series, but I have no definite plans for how or when.

The next time, Barnes finds him, more or less.

“Remind me again why we can’t stock this place with proper beans?” Tony asks, less to Pepper or Hill and more to the heavens or whatever cruel gods oversee his life.

“Because this is only the second time we’ve used this place for a rendezvous,” Pepper answers. Her tone is flat and even, almost bored, but one of her Jimmy Choos is clacking insistently against unfinished concrete. She sees Tony noticing and crosses her legs.

Tony dumps twice as much as the recommended amount of instant coffee into the machine, sighing in defeat as he presses ‘brew.’

“That’s no reason to live like animals,” he mutters.

Hill doesn’t even glance their way, massaging her temples with a vengeance. “Just make the damn coffee, Stark.”

They’re in the basement of a small office complex on the fringes of DC. Some inconsequential branch of SI rented the top few floors almost a decade ago, before the tech whose relevant papers were getting pushed was rendered obsolete. Various renters have been bouncing in and out since, but the drafty basement’s always empty.

It took Tony almost four minutes to manufacture keycards for the place, but he maintains he could’ve done it in two if Rhodey hadn’t been wrestling him for the remote.

Pepper checks her watch for the ninety-ninth time. “She’s twenty minutes late.”

“Probably just likes the idea that she’s making Stark wait,” Hill snaps, then presses her eyes shut for a moment before straightening. “She’s covering her tracks, if I know Romanoff. When we hit twenty-five you can worry.”

It’s only twenty-two when Nat slips in, wearing a sleek blazer and dark circles under her eyes.

“Stark,” she says, with the blank professionalism that Tony has decided to interpret as affection. “Maria; Pepper.”

“How’s consulting treating you?” Hill asks, sly, like she already knows.

“About as well as liaising with senators,” Natasha replies. “I’m starting to miss Moscow.”

“I’m sure we could find some work for you over there,” Hill says, and they exchange half-smirks. It’s like watching a nature documentary– socialization and pack bonding between alpha females. The coffee maker beeps and Tony slumps in relief, fills a mug to the brim and promptly burns his tongue.

He barely notices before the burn’s healed. Extremis has some perks.

Tony pours another cup and passes it to Pepper, who shoots him one of her gorgeous, private smiles before undermining his generous act by getting up anyway to retrieve coffee for Hill and Natasha. Tony decides to be mature about it and doesn’t even roll his eyes.

Pleasantries out of the way, they manage almost ten minutes of debrief and strategizing before things go sideways.

Tony sees Pepper reacting before he really registers the sound– a tiny dimple forms between her brow, a tell that she’s only half-paying attention to the conversation. He looks up, but of course all he sees is the building’s piping. Enhanced senses or no, Extremis does not provide X-ray vision, so all he’s really aware of is someone moving clumsily through the first floor hallways.

Pepper uncrosses her legs and pushes her chair back from the table, gaze unfocused. She’s listening to the same sounds, and coming to the same conclusion as Tony– that kind of hubbub, in this building, just after they’ve gathered? Only a coincidence if you use ‘coincidence’ to mean ‘very bad sign.’

Tony gets to his feet reflexively, hands itching for gauntlets. He’s on the brink of summoning the armor when the upstairs crew moves into hearing range of Natasha and Hill, who react instantly.

Natasha’s got a weapon out and the stairwell covered between the space of one breath and the next. Hill, meanwhile, is in a ready stance but has a hand out, signaling Tony to stand down. The order chafes, but he forces his hands to relax. He’s learning about teamwork.

They wait like that for almost a minute, breathing shallowly and listening. Whoever’s approaching sounds like they’ve only just figured out what feet are for and don’t quite get how gravity factors in yet, but Tony thinks he counts three or four through the blundering.

When the stairwell door finally opens, Tony’s not expecting any of the people who fall into the room. He immediately chastises himself, because of course it’s these three.

Tony recognizes Sam Wilson from Hill’s files, although in pictures the man always looks cool and collected, not covered in blood and deeply irritated about it. He’s followed closely by a limping, furious-looking Bucky Barnes, who Tony honestly expected never to see again.

And between the two of them, they’re dragging nearly three hundred pounds of unconscious American hero.

Natasha’s at their side immediately, shouldering Sam out of the way and checking Steve’s vitals.

“He’ll be fine,” she announces. “Not sure why he’s even knocked out. Someone drug him?”

“Ran into some fools who probably thought they were keeping the peace. I understand it’s hard to tell SHIELD and HYDRA apart these days, but how come people don’t believe us when we say we’re not either?” Wilson asks, slumping against a wall now that Natasha’s taken up his burden.

Well, Natasha and the floor. Wilson and Barnes kind of dropped him once Natasha joined in his care.

“Task force hunting SHIELD cells,” Barnes supplies, more usefully. “They seem to have replicated SHIELD’s stunning weapons. Took four at once to knock Rogers out.”

“Of course it did,” Tony puts in. “The man’s a big blonde elephant.”

“How did you find us, and how likely is it that you were followed?” Hill asks, ignoring Tony altogether. She and Wilson confer briefly before she disappears upstairs. Barnes seems reluctant to stay behind, but she points out that he and Wilson are both atrociously conspicuous and he subsides.

Natasha, meanwhile, finishes a more thorough inspection of Steve’s wounds and starts arranging his limbs, casting a considering glance at the table. Before she can attempt to lift him, though, Pepper’s already scooping him up, telltale red-gold glowing through her skin as her muscles flex.

Barnes and Wilson watch her with some interest. Tony finds himself wondering if Bucky could’ve lifted Steve as easily as Pepper did, and decides, as usual, that Pepper is superior to all other human beings.

Natasha declares that she’s going to run a perimeter, leaves directions for what to do if they don’t hear from herself or Hill within fifteen minutes, and follows the other agent up the stairs.

Tony retrieves his coffee and slurps it as loudly as he can. It almost echoes in near-empty concrete room.

“So,” he says. “Nice to see you both. How are Shirley and the kids?”

“Yeah,” Wilson says, eyeing Tony, “Steve said you were a weird one.”

-

Hill comes back not long after Natasha, and the two agree that Wilson and Barnes managed to shake off their pursuit long before they reached the building.

“I actually wanted to meet primarily to alert you that Rogers is back stateside,” Hill muses. “Mission accomplished, I suppose.”

There’s a whirlwind of spy-speak, business planning, and claims of appointments that can’t be missed, and suddenly Tony’s alone with the trio of misfit toys. Natasha’s too public to be seen with a fugitive like the Winter Soldier, so she sneaks out a back exit or a ventilation duct or something; Hill and Pep skulk off together, maybe to do something brilliant with SI or maybe to mack like teenagers. Tony’s never sure.

“Your place or mine?” Tony asks Wilson.

“I want to get my deposit back,” Wilson replies, and Tony decides he can stick around.

He considers taking the armor to pick up a car of his own, but between counting on Happy’s discretion and leaving Barnes unattended, Tony elects to call for a ride. So they have almost half an hour, barring traffic, of twiddling their thumbs and watching Steve sleep.

The man looks haggard. Tony can’t help but think that maybe the task force did him a favor by bullying him into a nap.

Wilson breaks the silence first. “So Iron Man, huh?”

Tony nods, adds, “I have a helmet on when I’m thirty thousand feet up. Unlike some people.”

Then he squints, leans forward. “They’ve been looking for you since DC. Been with these kooks the whole time?”

Barnes shifts his weight, but doesn’t look away from his vigil on the stairwell door.

Wilson follows Tony’s gaze to Barnes’ back. “Let’s just say I’ve gotten really good at hide and seek.”

Exactly as Tony would’ve expected, waiting in a basement with three military types– one of whom is getting his forty winks– does not make for good conversation. But he does manage to extricate some vague allusions to the spots Wilson and Steve visited in their pursuit, which he stores away for later cross-referencing, and– more immediately– how they managed to find the office complex Hill and Pepper chose as a rendezvous spot.

“Here,” Wilson says, holding out a slim and painfully outdated tablet. “Buck had it.”

Tony stares at it until Wilson sets it on the table. He ignores Wilson’s perplexed expression as he picks it up, swipes around, and– yep– it’s the same one he gave to Barnes just over a year ago. Well, gave to, had stolen by; semantics.

But he’d locked it down. He’s certain. Tony’s careless about dirty dishes, where he leaves his socks, maybe even his sports car collection sometimes– but not his tech, and certainly not his databases. For Barnes to use his own tech to track him, that’s– well, it’s not good news.

It’s kind of impressive, but it’s not good news.

Tony shrugs, slides the tablet into his suit’s coat pocket– he made a model in this size for that exact purpose– and leans back in his chair, hands behind his head.

“Glad you didn’t leave Goldilocks here to nap in an alleyway that’s just right, I guess,” he says. “Think he’ll be waking up any time this century?”

He expected a reaction at that, would’ve been an idiot not to, but it doesn’t come from where he thought it would. Barnes, at the doorway, goes a little stiff and makes a sound that could be anger or amusement or some kind of release of super-assassin fumes. Wilson, though– Wilson’s gaze lands hard on Tony, jaw tight, hands restless like he’s looking for a reason to make fists.

Tony files that little tidbit away for later, pulls out his cell and dials Happy.

“You’re in charge of security, right, because I’m in a basement with a bunch of geriatric soldiers and Harvey Birdman, I’d feel a lot safer behind the wheel of a Lamborghini,” he says. Happy mutters something back. He probably knows Tony isn’t particularly listening. Instead he’s pacing, trying to keep Wilson and Barnes in his line of sight without looking suspicious, hoping Steve didn’t just drop a national incident on his doorstep.

-

Steve wakes up while Happy is still almost ten minutes away, and for some reason he looks even less excited to see Tony than he used to before the whole aliens-portal-nuclear bomb thing. He relaxes dramatically when Wilson gives him a rundown of the situation. Barnes gives Steve a nod that Tony would almost call awkward, if it didn’t imply more emotion than Barnes is really capable of displaying, and it doesn’t escape Tony’s notice that that’s when Steve actually lies back, looks almost content.

Apparently he wasn’t sure Barnes would be there when he woke up. Interesting.

Happy was smart enough not to bring a Lamborghini to collect four adult men, of course, so they pile into some SUV Tony forgot he even had and make the incredibly uncomfortable trek back to Tony’s DC house. Before Happy can get out of the drivers’ seat, Tony makes a comment about giving his road rage a break, takes shotgun instead. It keeps his hands free.

He spends half the drive focused on the tablet, reverse-engineering Barnes’ tracking, and half watching the backseat in the rearview mirror. Wilson and Steve exchange a few quiet sentences, and Wilson knocks his shoulder gently against Steve’s, which is fascinating. Barnes’ eyes are huge and he never stops looking around, probably planning and revising exit strategies nonstop, but he doesn’t lean away from Steve. Tony decides to take that as a good sign.

When they reach the house, Tony gives them the run of a few bedroom suites. He follows that up with a half-assed tour– “don’t touch anything that looks like it might blow up or call the president, it’ll probably do both; kitchen’s over there; if you need anything, figure it out on your own, I have shit to do and you guys don’t have an appointment”– and disappears into his own suite. Much as he’d love to stay and pump them for information, he really does have shit to get done, and sticking his nose into SHIELD business hadn’t worked out so well for him last time. So.

-

Steve seeks him out first, which Tony kind of expected, because they did save the world together and stuff. He’s irritable and borderline abrasive until Tony explains that he’s not HYDRA, he had no idea what the Insight Helicarriers were programmed to do– and maybe Tony explains pretty loudly and his eyes get kind of wet and he throws an entire bottle of whiskey at the wall, whatever. The point is, Steve eases up after that.

He apologizes, stiffly, for “getting Tony involved,” and offers to go as soon as they’re sure no one’s got them tracked.

“Sure thing,” Tony says, still feeling kind of detached from his body after the whole whiskey bottle incident. That was an expensive bottle, a voice at the back of his mind supplies.

“I can check Barnes’ arm for tracers again, if he wants. It was clean last time I looked, but if he’s had maintenance done since then–” Tony stops himself at the look on Steve’s face.

“Bucky– let you look at his arm?” he asks, and Tony shifts in his seat.

“‘Let me,’ ‘made me at threat of bodily harm,’ however you want to phrase it.”

Steve’s expression doesn’t clear so much as shift, brow furrowed, lines of his mouth softening just slightly. Tony doesn’t really know him well enough to say if that means he’s thoughtful or just nonplussed, but his experience suggests Steve’s not the type to stay confused about anything for very long.

He ends the conversation shortly after that. Tony goes back to his designs for a non-threatening global surveillance network, and doesn’t wonder what Steve was thinking.

-

When Barnes finds him, Tony’s in an office rather than his workshop. He likes to think that’s why he didn’t notice Barnes for– whatever indeterminate amount of time; he never does ask JARVIS how long Barnes watched him. But one minute he’s digging some of the biotracers out of one of his outdated Extremis-compatible armor models, and the next he’s trying to fling himself between his interfaces and the dark figure in the corner.

Barnes ignores Tony’s flailing like that’s how people always act around him. Tony wonders, briefly, if that’s because it is.

“Rog– Steve– said I should let you look at this.”

He holds out his arm towards Tony, then, glancing down at it just once. Last time Tony saw Barnes, the man flowed with the arm, putting it between himself and threats on instinct, relying on it unflinchingly, even when it was cracked open with wires exposed. Now, he’s moving like it’s a foreign object someone stitched to him.

Tony swallows down the thought.

“No gun this time? I didn’t even give my safeword,” he replies. Barnes’ gaze flickers, and Tony wonders if he came close to rolling his eyes. Steve would’ve.

But it really is kind of a concern of Tony’s, that someone could’ve found a way to trace Barnes’ mods. The arm is a beautiful offensive tool, gives Barnes a thousand edges no one else would have in infiltration and recon and close-range combat. But it’s also surprisingly vulnerable to tech-based espionage. Tony can’t help but think the only reason HYDRA left such an opening on one of their operatives is because they were confident they knew all the best ways to exploit it.

“Sit, sit, time is money,” he says, dumping his screwdriver and the gauntlet on a workbench. A very cluttered workbench. On second thought, he shoves everything off of it. The resulting clatter and open workspace are deeply satisfying.

“Not the other way around, mind,” he adds, gesturing for Barnes to take a seat. A second later Tony realizes his mistake, squats on the floor and starts digging for the tools to open up the arm. “I am assured that even I cannot possibly convert money into time, no matter how much trouble that would save us all.”

When he looks up, Barnes isn’t sitting down. He doesn’t appear to have moved at all. Tony’s not sure the man’s actually blinked since he first arrived, but his mouth is doing something weird that could almost be called smirking.

Tony shakes his head to clear it and turns back to his tools.

-

Barnes’ arm is clean, and Rogers and Wilson don’t really need anything besides a little R&R, so after that Tony goes back to his work. He kind of forgets about them all, actually. Which he wouldn’t have thought possible, but then again he’s managed to get so engrossed in things that he forgot about bodily functions until– well, there’s a reason the suit has built-in bio-waste disposal, is the moral of that story.

So Tony spends two days programming before he realizes it’s weird that he still has house guests. He hangs up his call with Hill, scoops up his mug, and wanders into the wing the army brats have apparently chosen to nest in.

He finds Rogers and Wilson huddled together in the first sitting room, voices low but urgent, leaning in so close their knees are knocking. Which, A, confirms some of Tony’s pet theories, and B, is just a good image. He feeds that data to his hindbrain for storage and takes a long pull of his coffee, hoping to refocus himself on the matter at hand. The coffee has gone the kind of room-temperature that suggests hours or even days to acclimate to its surroundings. So as concentration aids go, it works.

“Where’s the toy soldier?” he asks, which makes a muscle in Wilson’s jaw twitch. Rogers, on the other hand, doesn’t even flinch. He’s come so far; it warms Tony’s heart.

But then Wilson replies with ,“Why, you looking for him?” and Tony wonders what, exactly, the pair were talking about.

“Only one who hasn’t been, actually,” answers Barnes, and his words hang in the doorway, make the whole room feel flat and static.

“Truer words, my friend,” Tony says, taps his index finger to his nose. “Now, are you three planning on shacking up here, or did you just get lost looking for the exit? It’s a big building, I know; but there are these handy signs, glow red when it’s dark–”

“We’re still waiting to hear from–” Rogers begins, at the same time Wilson interrupts with “oh, is that what those are?” in a glorious deadpan. Tony gets what Rogers sees in the guy.

And then there’s a pause that seems unnecessarily tense. Wilson and Rogers start arguing again, apparently about whether they’re going to hear from some higher power or another. Tony takes another sip of his days-old fucking coffee like an idiot, then wonders idly whether he could train Dum-E to clear out old mugs. More likely to smash them, but it’d serve the same end. He notices that Barnes is still lurking in the doorway, all horror-movie-extra, and no one’s asked him to sit.

As enticing as Wilson and Rogers’ bickering is– and Tony’s half expecting one of them to shove the other against a wall, even odds on which one– he’s actually got much bigger fish to fry than wondering whether three rogue agents have a magical mystery SO or not, so he rolls his eyes and turns to go.

“Rent’s due on the first,” he adds over his shoulder, and the argument dies instantly, replaced by a hoarse snort of laughter. It takes Tony a second to realize that Rogers and Wilson have both gone silent because Barnes is the one laughing.


End file.
